inspirations

I’ve been studying ways we might reduce errors--including my own!--in crowdsourced transcription projects. Part of that work has been analyzing a dataset of raw volunteer contributions to the Missouri State Archives death certificate indexing project, but another part has been reading what textual scholars have written about errors left by ancient and medieval scribes. Eugène … [Read more...] about What’s the Difference Between a Crowdsourcing Volunteer and a Medieval Scribe?

Sitting next to a senior leader of a European library at a IIIF event, he expressed concern that asking volunteers to work on transcribing was taking unfair advantage of free labor.  My internal reaction was, “you just want to keep all the good stuff for yourself!” -- but of course I didn’t say that.  I talked about meaningful volunteer work and how -- since our … [Read more...] about Crowdsourcing: Free Labor or Free Puppy?